Essays on sorting, mobility, and attrition in the teacher labor market

This research consists of three separate studies to examine a number of issues concerned with the supply of teachers to the labor force. The first analysis applies the job queue model, which is employed using a bivariate probit with partial observability, to the teacher labor market. This model is able to separately identify the personal characteristics most commonly associated with a teacher's desire to seek a low-poverty or low-minority school, as well as the personal characteristics of the teachers that these schools prefer to hire. The empirical results, using a sample of public school teachers from the Schools and Staffing Survey 1999-2000, suggest that a job queue exists for low-poverty and low-minority schools. The second analysis examines the effect of student characteristics on the turnover patterns of public elementary school teachers in a large, culturally diverse school district in California. Household income statistics at the census tract level have been linked with their respective schools in order to examine the effect of neighborhood prosperity on a teacher's decision to quit teaching at a particular school. Descriptive statistics indicate that when teachers switch schools, the schools in which they transfer into tend to have similar student demographics but are much higher achieving. Results from a single risk Cox proportional hazard model indicate that an additional 50 points on the school's Academic Performance Index, which represents approximately one-half of a standard deviation, is associated with a 10% decrease in the probability that the teacher will quit teaching at the school. In the third analysis, an independent competing risks model is applied to the Baccalaureate and Beyond survey. The results, using a piecewise constant exponential hazard with varying forms of unobserved heterogeneity, indicate that student teaching and instructional support for novice teachers are associated with reduced teacher attrition. In addition, helping novice teachers become acclimated to the new school environment is strongly related to teacher retention within a particular school. These results provide evidence that schools which have a difficult time retaining teachers may be able to influence turnover rates by implementing new teacher support systems within the school.